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In Do You Believe in Magic?, medical expert Paul A. Offit, M.D., offers a scathing exposé of the alternative medicine industry, revealing how even though some popular therapies are remarkably helpful due to the placebo response, many of them are ineffective, expensive, and even deadly.Dr. Offit reveals how alternative medicine—an unregulated industry under no legal obligation to prove its claims or admit its risks—can actually be harmful to our health.Using dramatic reallife stories, Offit separates the sense from the nonsense, showing why any therapy—alternative or traditional—should be scrutinized. He also shows how some nontraditional methods can do a great deal of good, in some cases exceeding therapies offered by conventional practitioners.An outspoken advocate for sciencebased health advocacy who is not afraid to take on media celebrities who promote alternative practices, Dr. Offit advises, “There’s no such thing as alternative medicine. There’s only medicine that works and medicine that doesn’t.”
[...]... learning It continues to evolve because it continues to generate new information It isn’t fixed in time But the fluidity of modern medicine can be unsettling Alternative medicine s certainty, on the other hand, can be quite reassuring Ironically, while alternative remedies are embraced in the developed world, they’re often rejected in the countries where they originated In mainland China, for example,... after the deaths of Joey Hofbauer and Steve McQueen, cancer specialist Charles Moertel, of the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, led research teams at UCLA, the University of Arizona, and the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, in New York, in the clinical trial proposed by Franz Ingelfinger They treated 178 cancer victims with laetrile and high doses of vitamins, finding that the combination... philosopher In a culture that doesn’t understand technology, and is often frightened and disappointed by it, spiritualism is an easy sell Finally, practitioners of alternative medicine appeal to the popular notion that you can manage your own health, that you don’t need doctors to tell you what to do Alternative medicine is at the grass roots level,” says Oz And because of that, nobody owns it Alternative medicine. .. machines the Mayans saw this coming thousands of years ago.” The writers of 2012 knew their audience Many people believe that ancient healers and soothsayers, free from confusing modern technologies, possessed a clearer, wiser view of things “One of the arguments mobilized by alternative medicine practitioners against orthodox medicine is that the latter is constantly changing while alternative medicine. .. a white bandage wrapped around a bloody arm.) In the United States, Benjamin Rush, a well-respected Philadelphia physician and signer of the Declaration of Independence, was a big proponent of bloodletting Rush was so influential that when George Washington suffered epiglottitis (inflammation of the flap of tissue that sits on top of the windpipe), his doctors chose bloodletting instead of the tracheotomy... determined by the number of days in the year Depending on the practitioner, needles were inserted up to four inches deep and left in place from a few seconds to a few hours And that’s pretty much the way things stood until the late 1700s Practitioners continued to offer therapies based on religious notions of divine intervention or Greek notions of balancing humors or Chinese notions of balancing energies... Chocolate to Morphine: Everything You Need to Know About Mind-Altering Drugs Weil even has a hallucinogenic mushroom, Psilocybe weilii, named after him But Weil’s apotheosis came in 1995 with the publication of Spontaneous Healing, in which he claimed that health and illness are “manifestations of good and evil, requiring the help of religion and philosophy to understand and all the techniques of magic to... psychiatry, nutritional medicine, chelation therapy for cardiovascular disease, and alternative cancer therapies.” Joey Hofbauer’s story, while extreme, contains much of what attracts people to alternative therapies today: a heartfelt distrust of modern medicine (John and Mary Hofbauer didn’t believe the advice of hematologists and oncologists); the notion that large doses of vitamins mean better health... From the beginning to the end of the twentieth century, the life span of Americans had increased by thirty years None of this increase occurred because healers balanced humors, restored chi, or offered sacrifices to the gods; it occurred because we finally understood what caused diseases and how to treat or prevent them In a sense, The Dr Oz Show is a voyage back through the history of medicine, starting... Diamond in Snake Oil and Other Preoccupations “But if you go to the countries where those remedies are all they have, you ll find them crying out for good old Western antibiotics, painkillers, and all the rest of the modern and expensive pharmacopoeia When the government of South Africa complains that not enough is being done to help the 10 percent of its population which is HIV-positive, it isn’t asking . acquired Alacer Corporation, one of the country’s largest manufacturers of megavitamins. The reason alternative therapies are popular is simple. Mainstream doctors are perceived as uncaring and. and individual attention instead of take -a- number -and- wait-your-turn inattention. Like many people who have spent time in today’s health-care system, my experiences have been largely disappointing. I. the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the American Medical Association (AMA) is that this substance [has] no known value [for] the treatment of any disease . . . I understand that some alleged